Aw geez, not this @#$@ again

[lazypadawan]

With New!Trek upon us, the ugliest rivalry since the Yankees and the Red Sox could flare up again. First to light a fire and throw in some kerosene is our old buddy Simon Pegg, who plays Scotty in the flick. Pegg is famously a PT basher but now he thinks SW has no integrity!! From an interview with New York Timeout's website:

Star Trek, in the end, seems to have won the war, because it maintained its integrity, and now the effects are catching up as well. So you sort of get your Star Trek cake and eat it, too. I'm sure Star Wars fans around the world will want to kill me for saying that, and see me as a traitor, because I've always been a very outspoken fan of Star Wars, but I've never been publicly keen on the new ones.

It makes you want to look up at the ceiling and yell, "KHAAAAAAN!!!" Integrity? WTF is he talking about? Lucas made the movies he wanted to make, not kowtowing to fanboy nation or movie critics or internet dweebs. That's integrity.

Please tell me again why do people at Lucasfilm suck up to this guy?

Comments

[equustel.livejournal.com]

Oh please. I will never understand this urge, apparently inbred exclusively in fanboys (never in my life have I seen the fangirl nation involved in a franchise war).

I'm gonna watch and probably really enjoy the new Trek, but every time I hear someone call it "what the prequels should have been" I am just gonna continue laughing my arse off, cos J.J. Abrams expressly stated that he was trying to inject the Trek franchise with SW's energy and more universal appeal. Why? Because Star Wars has what other space operas are missing.

[ladyaeryn.livejournal.com]

Pegg can just STFD already. Trek has maintained its integrity to its original spirit? I call bullshit with one word: Nemesis. A splosiony-shoot-em-up with little to no heart and all the character development ending up on the cutting-room-floor, which is what I fear this new film will also be, based on JJ Abrams' interviews where he also made more or less the same sort of backhands at the PT. How on earth did Nemesis uphold Trek's core ideal of humanity constantly striving to better itself? (People knock the previous film, Insurrection, but at the very least it was at its heart about upholding that ideal.) The one part of Nem that could possibly have upheld that wound up being an undercut, watered-down knock off of Spock's sacrifice in Wrath of Khan.

I love how GL is somehow both a tyrant who lets no one else have input and that's why the PT sucks - and also a person with no original thought who just caved to his fans, and that's why the PT sucks. Make up your minds.

[darth-pipes.livejournal.com]

I'm a fan of both Star Wars and Star Trek and I'm looking forward to the film. But Star Wars won the war because they are the most popular film franchise of all time.

[may-child.livejournal.com]

As if I didn't loathe Pegg enough already.

No integrity? WTF is he talking about? One of the main bitchings from the stupid bashers was that Lucas "made the movies he wanted to make, not caring that the fans wanted to see Anakin at 17 in Episode 1 and for the Clone Wars to be the background for all three movies and for Anakin to be as pure as the new driven snow, but also dark and angry and practically Vader from the outset, and for the movies to be about Obi Wan and Anakin's adventures, blah blah blah."

In a truly bizarre article about the release of "Return of the King"

*waits for choirs of heavenly angels to die down at the mention of the Holiest of Holies*

*waits*

*waits*

*16 hours later* Oh to heck with it.

In a "New York Times" article about the premiere of the Third Movie in the Most Perfect, Holy, Life-Changing, Edifyingly Sublime Trilogy Ever Made, they quoted some woman in the audience who put down the LOTR book she was reading and started talking about...George Lucas?!? She said that while Lucas "just sits in front of a computer all day long, Peter Jackson..."

*shoos away choirs of heavenly angels; I'm sick of them appearing when His Holy Name is mentioned and having to wait 16 hours for them to shut up*

"...understands how to make these movies because he's a fan of the story and he cares about what fans think."

Recently, there was a letter in TV Guide in response to a CW article in which it said something akin to, "George is making these stories for himself." The letter sneered, "No wonder he hasn't put out anything decent since 1980."

Simon Pegg can go f**k himself. And I wish LFL would quit kissing his stupid ass.

[laariii.livejournal.com]

I like Star Trek but its so...cold. It just doesn't have the "magic" that Star Wars does. Maybe its because its a rather materialistic view of the universe rather than a spiritual or theistic one. At least that's my opinion.
I don't think you can really compare the two. They are so different.

[roseredhoofbeat.livejournal.com]

Some days I feel the only person who likes Star Trek, Star wars, AND Lord of the Rings... all pretty much equally. You just have to remember All true Star Wars fans hate Star Wars (http://www.jivemagazine.com/column.php?pid=3381).

[rkc-erika.livejournal.com]

*Yawn* Yes, and guess what idiot the FX on Trek would look like they did in the predecessors had Lucas NOT made the prequels.

Don't let it rile you up - once the Live Action SW comes to TV the FX on it will blow anything that Abrams does out of the water.

[knight-ander.livejournal.com]

JJ has got to be pulling his hair out after reading that. Comments like that don't help at all.

[matril.livejournal.com]

Ugh. I like Star Trek. Not the same way I love Star Wars, of course not. But I don't see why there has to be a conflict between the two. I recall there was a chapter in Leonard Nimoy's autobiography titled something like "Thank you, George Lucas" because he proved that large-scale, blockbuster space films were possible, and thus paved the way for Star Trek movies. I'd like to see more of that friendliness.

(I am, however, very leery of this new Star Trek film. I fear that it's missing the real point of it in favor of noisy explosions. People may say it's Star Trek with a kind of Star Wars influence, but I fear it's influenced more by, say, Independence Day or other such loud films without great substance. Just my impressions from the trailers, of course. :)

[angryscientist.livejournal.com]

Please tell me again why do people at Lucasfilm suck up to this guy?

Prolly because Shaun of the Dead is hi-larious.

Pegg needs to stop being so loud about this shit because his movie still hasn't been released. It'd be a shame if JJ mucks it up. I have no faith in the guy.

[sabreman64.livejournal.com]

Star Trek has maintained its integrity while Star Wars has lost its integrity? What the hell is he on about?

I've seen a couple of the TV adverts for the new Star Trek film, and I get the impression that with this new film Abrams is aping Star Wars. The brief shots in the adverts look more like something from Star Wars than Star Trek. It's as if Abrams wants to make a Star Wars film, but as he knows he can't make a genuine Star Wars film he decides to make a Star Trek film that merely apes Star Wars. I may be completely wrong about this but that's the impression of the film I get. An impression that is strengthened by the fact that the actor playing the new Kirk supposedly claims that he based his portrayal of Kirk on Han Solo.

I grew up watching the original Star Trek on TV over and over again. I've been a fan of the original Kirk and Spock for about as long as I've been a Star Wars fan (about 30 years). But I have no intention of seeing Abrams's new film. There are several reasons for this. One is Simon Pegg. Another is that the filmmakers seem to have contradicted a lot of the already established backstory of Kirk, Spock and co (if what I've heard about the film is true). And one major reason is that I feel that Kirk and Spock are such iconic characters that recasting the roles is wrong. Hell, can you imagine Luke, Han and Leia being recast and having the original Star Wars trilogy remade? I feel it's a bit like that.

Anyway, rant over. Sorry about that.

[ayajedi.livejournal.com]

I like Star Wars. Lord of the Rings AND Star Trek. I don't see why people have to pit one against the other.
I may watch the new Star Trek film because I like John Cho. I'm not as big a Star Trek fan as I am of star Wars and I've been watching both since in the 1970s!

[sabreman64.livejournal.com]

I've read about one particular event in the new Star Trek film which seems to provide further evidence that Abrams is aping Star Wars. I won't mention what that event is as it would spoil it for anyone reading this who intends to see the film.

[(Anonymous)]

I have to say up front, I'm a big fan of Simon Pegg. I have been for years now. I remember when he was on Big Train and Brass Eye (the Paedophile sketch in particular was cutting and hilarious), I loved Spaced which he co-wrote and co-starred in with the wonderful Jessica Stevenson (now Hynes - and something of a *soft* prequels defender - which is to say she's admitted to liking them), I enjoyed his appearance on Doctor Who, own both Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead on DVD, and am very much looking forward to his next flick.

That being said every statement he makes about Star Wars, including the one above, is crap. He's little more than a bitter fanboy when it comes to this particular topic. He didn't like episode's I-III, thats fine, but there seems to be a real sourness to him in relation to this, and as a fan of his it really disappoints me. In fairness, he isn't blind to it, he did take the piss out of himself in the second season of Spaced for it. But not without getting a few licks in against Lucas. So we needn't be too fair.

As for the new Star Trek. I haven't seen it yet. I'm a huge fan of Trek (and I mean a proper book buying, list making, OCD fighting FAN) and when I was offered tickets to a preview a couple of weeks ago, my reaction was - and I hate this term, so forgive me but - *meh*.

Now in the intervening weeks I've come round. It actually looks like a good fun, action, adventure flick. I still hold reservations: Kirk's character seems drawn from the consensus caricature, rebel-without-a-cause misconception of who Kirk is, rather than the man William Shatner actually played. Young Kirk was always described as bookish, academic, and ambitious; not reckless, callous, and (at least to begin with) directionless, as he seems to be in this movie. In fact the Kirk I'm seeing in these trailers seems more akin to how Jean-Luc Picard was supposed to have been in his youth.

One old friend of Kirk's actually described him as being "a stack of books with legs" while at the academy.

Should this matter? Not really. No. Its been a bit of a pet peeve of mine that the character has been consistently misread over the years, and I do find the original version more interesting, but this shouldn't affect the quality of the movie.

The other thing though, is the tone I'm picking up off the trailers. This feels - dare I say it - like Star Wars in Star Trek's clothing. For all the nonsense rivalry between the two franchises they are, but for having Star in their titles and being set in space, completely different. I got the impression that Abrams (who I like) is making the Star Wars picture he's always wanted to make, but calling it Trek.

Star Trek always had that Cowboys & Indians flavour to it, that was part of its appeal. But it was always more sedate, cerebral (Star Wars goes more for the heart, the blood, at least up front), and majesterial. This film seems not to get that. Of course you need the sturm and drang to get the joe soapers interested. I just hope there's a bit more substance in there when all's said and done.

My favourite thing about Star Trek is the sense of exploration. If humankind ever does it; launches massive, three and four hundred staffed starships into the depths of unknown space, just to see what's out there, it will be the best thing we ever do. That feeling, that sense of seizing the future, of 'boldly going where no one has gone before', that is what Star Trek is about. Explosions, and outer space battles... these things are nice, but not really part of the program.

In the end Lucas's saga might aim to get the blood pumping, but it's not only concerned with that. There are deeper themes at work. I hope that Abrams, in trying to map some Wars onto Trek, remembered that at least.